Hi guys,
Been out of the hardware game for a while here, and never built an m-ATX system so I thought I'd defer to overclockers great hive mind.
Basically I've been asked by a friend to help spec and build him a small PC that's still powerful enough for photo/video editing and a small bit of gaming on the side maybe. I'm thinking 16GB of ram and aiming more at a powerful CPU rather than a high end GPU. The equivelent of a 760gtx would be more than enough I'd imagine.
For case we've looked around and he likes the look of the Silverstone Grandia G05. He wants a blu-ray player and the full sized 5.25 inch bay at the front will save money rather than having to fork out for a slimline player. The only downside of the case is that it doesn't have room to put in a card reader which he'd like to be able to keep internal.
The primary concern for the case is to be as low as possible while still keeping the option for full profile expansion cards. The 151mm height of the G05 is fine, ideally not much more than that though.
As for storage he'd like a 2TB harddrive and a 256gb SSD for the operating system and programs so the case would need atleast one 3.5 inch and one 2.5 inch internal drive bay.
Apart from the case what I really don't know much about is what a good mAtx motherboard and CPU combo would be. Is it worth going Haswell? Are they much faster than say a slightly overclocked 3570k i5?
Budget wise it would be nice to keep it around £800 for the base system so no need to spec a monitor or other external bits.
Been out of the hardware game for a while here, and never built an m-ATX system so I thought I'd defer to overclockers great hive mind.
Basically I've been asked by a friend to help spec and build him a small PC that's still powerful enough for photo/video editing and a small bit of gaming on the side maybe. I'm thinking 16GB of ram and aiming more at a powerful CPU rather than a high end GPU. The equivelent of a 760gtx would be more than enough I'd imagine.
For case we've looked around and he likes the look of the Silverstone Grandia G05. He wants a blu-ray player and the full sized 5.25 inch bay at the front will save money rather than having to fork out for a slimline player. The only downside of the case is that it doesn't have room to put in a card reader which he'd like to be able to keep internal.
The primary concern for the case is to be as low as possible while still keeping the option for full profile expansion cards. The 151mm height of the G05 is fine, ideally not much more than that though.
As for storage he'd like a 2TB harddrive and a 256gb SSD for the operating system and programs so the case would need atleast one 3.5 inch and one 2.5 inch internal drive bay.
Apart from the case what I really don't know much about is what a good mAtx motherboard and CPU combo would be. Is it worth going Haswell? Are they much faster than say a slightly overclocked 3570k i5?
Budget wise it would be nice to keep it around £800 for the base system so no need to spec a monitor or other external bits.
